FSU Passover - April 2005

FSU Jews Celebrate Passover in 2005

Jewish Week: "'Heroic' Seders" in Belarus
JTA: U.S., Israeli Jews Help Make Russian Seders
JTA: "Seders in Russia Reach Adolescence"

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Jewish Week - 04.29.2005

New York Jewish Week

‘Heroic’ Seders

Even in halls without heat, Jews in a former Soviet republic celebrate Passover despite winter chill.

Steve Lipman - Staff Writer 

Grodno, Belarus — Tsilia Brido remembers her early Belarus Passover in her Polotsk hometown, her grandfather leading the seders in Hebrew, women from the neighborhood baking their matzahs in her family’s large wood stove. 

“It was before the war,” she says, referring to World War II. Belarus was the first of the former Soviet Union’s republics to be invaded by the German army. 

Brido remembers the seders ending after 1941, first under the Nazis, then under the communists. 

“After the war, it was not allowed,” says the widow with flaming red hair and a teenager’s spirit. 

She remembers returning to seders in 1988, in the early years of the liberalization under President Mikhail Gorbachev, first in Grodno’s synagogue, then in sites rented by the city’s Orthodox community. 

On Saturday night she went again. 

In a city that was home to one of the former Pale of Settlement’s most prominent Jewish communities; in a republic that became independent when the USSR collapsed in 1991; in a society that is gearing up to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of what the ubiquitous signs call “The Great Patriotic War,” Brido, 75, joined more than fellow Grodno Jews the first night of Passover at a community seder at the Culinary Institute, a small school in the center of this city. 

At daytime and nighttime seders at the institute, the Choral Synagogue and the headquarters of the Chesed social services agency, and at some private homes, members of the Jewish community read from the Haggadah and shared pieces of matzah. 

Grodno was unusually cold, a winter chill descending on the city for the springtime holiday. “One-hundred twenty heroes” attended the seder in the Choral Synagogue, sitting at a long table in the cavernous, empty, unheated sanctuary. 

“Everyone who came is a hero,” said Boris Kviatovsky, chairman of the Jewish Religious Community of Grodno. 

Like last year, several hundred Jews participated in seders this year, said Yael Kalcheim, desk director for Belarus of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which finances the Chesed activities. 

“Pesach is the main holiday that people remembered, even people in their 50s,” who grew up without any formal Jewish education, Kalcheim said. 

As throughout the former Soviet Union and the once-communist countries of Eastern Europe, many of the seders here were remedial, teaching the Jews what they had forgotten or never learned. 

For the participants, the seders were a chance to dress up and socialize in a Jewish atmosphere. The men attended with their chests bedecked with WWII medals. 

“We were looking for Jewish people,” Brido, a retired druggist, said of her reasons for returning to seders with her friends when they became available and legal. “I wanted to feel Jewish again.” 

For Chesed, which sponsors an array of educational programs, the seders are a chance to serve its Jewish clients, using registration as a way to find out who are Grodno’s Jews and what they need. 

For YUSSR, the Yeshiva University-based organization that sends two dozen volunteers each year to lead seders in Belarus and Germany, they were a chance to publicize the annual camps it sponsors for children. 

Grodno had a majority Jewish population for centuries. This industrial city of 300,000 in western Belarus, on the banks of the Neiman River, was 40 percent Jewish on the eve of the Holocaust. 

Today its estimated Jewish population is 1,500 in a country with 30,000 Jews among a total population of 10 million. 

The Joint Distribution Committee, working through local organizations, has identified Jews in some 60 towns and villages. Sometimes it’s as few as a handful of Jews. 

The Jewish community, weakened as all Belarusans by the government’s still-socialist economic policies that discourage private enterprise, is largely dependent on assistance from foreign Jewish organizations. 

The Jewish Agency offers classes and other events with a Zionist orientation that promote aliyah. The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation sponsors several schools and the Lech Lecha Youth Center in Minsk, the capital. 

The JDC, which returned to Belarus in 1991, holds leadership training sessions to help wean the community from outside help. The Reform movement also has a presence — Rabbi Grisha Abramovich, who was ordained by London’s Leo Baeck College, led separate model seders for children and adults before setting out for holiday celebrations elsewhere in the country. 

YUSSR, which raises its own budget, comes here every Nissan. 

The seders I joined at the Culinary Institute were led by Joey Small, a Yeshiva University senior, and Serena Hefter, a Stern College sophomore. The first seder was mainly for senior citizens; families with children were invited the second night. 

The hall in the institute was unheated. 

Using games and theatrics, conducting the seders in English and Russian, distributing plague toys and prizes (donations from J. Levine Judaica of Manhattan and Congregation Tiferes Yisroel in Baltimore), Small and Hefter worked the crowd like politicians. They greeted the crowd at the door in simple Russian, wandered around the tables to schmooze and led rousing Hebrew songs. They had arrived a few days earlier to buy supplies and kasher the kitchen. 

Sitting at Small’s side during the seders was Grigory Khosid, a Grodno-born Holocaust survivor who serves as a community activist and leader of the religious community 

After morning services the second day of Passover, Khosid stood outside the Choral Synagogue, the only synagogue building in the city still used as a synagogue. Built in the 16th century and rebuilt after a disastrous fire two centuries ago, it sits at the edge of a gorge that cuts through the hilly city. The exterior of the stone building, which was used as a roundup center by the Nazis for the region’s Jews and housed various businesses during communist times, is crumbling. 

Upstairs, in a small room with flaking paint walls and bricked-up windows, where a minyan of elderly men in coats and caps prayed that morning across a makeshift mechitza from a few women, all heated by a small brick stove in the corner, the remains of a Mogen David are visible in the warped planks that line the ceiling. 

The synagogue is under the auspices of Rabbi Yitzchak Kofman, a Connecticut-born Lubavitch emissary who serves as the city’s chief rabbi. 

Pointing to a row of stones imbedded in the grass a few yards behind the synagogue, at one time a building’s foundation, Khosid said a small prayer house had been there before World War II. During the Nazi occupation, he knew about a forthcoming roundup, so Khosid said he snuck into the small building and climbed onto an empty space atop the ark, out of sight of the German soldiers who herded Jews into the crowded space. 

“I saved my life — that was one of many times,” he said, offering that he also escaped from a train bound for Treblinka. 

Khosid, who has maintained his Jewish practice despite decades under Nazi and communist regimes, is a fountain of knowledge about Grodno’s Jewish history and customs. 

Though Belarus is north of Israel, Grodno Jews still face east — ostensibly toward Jerusalem — when they pray, he said. 

“It’s a tradition,” he said, that was inherited from the Jews from Western countries — Grodno over the years welcomed refugees from the Inquisition and nearby pogroms — who had turned toward mizrach for prayers. 

Actually, they faced southeast, Khosid said, to avoid praying in then direction of a church, now long gone, across the street. n 

Steve Lipman’s visit to Belarus was supported by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.

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JTA - 04.27.2005

American and Israeli Jews teach Russian Jews how to make a seder

By Adam B. Ellick

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (JTA) -- Jennifer Phelps is especially sympathetic when she listens to her Russian counterparts share stories of a suppressed Jewish childhood under Soviet rule. 

It's a rather unexpected connectedness for a military kid who spent her 1980s childhood hopping around American air force bases with her parents during the final years of the Cold War. 

Phelps, now a 29-year-old Clevelander, was always the lone Jew in school, and her Jewish upbringing never left home. 

Her first visit to a synagogue came when she was a junior in college, an experience similar to that of some Jewish students in St. Petersburg. 

"I was never able to share it openly, just like the Jews here. I tucked in my Star of David on the military bases. There are so many commonalities between my life and theirs, bound together by oppressive backgrounds." 

Phelps is just one of 18 American and six Israeli young adults on a weeklong Passover visit to Russia's northern capital, where for the eighth consecutive year a partnership of several North American Jewish federations fosters Jewish learning. 

The Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County, Florida, and Israelis from the Safed region, who are linked by a Partnership 2000 affiliation with Palm Beach, came to join in the Pesach Project, a Hillel program that sees hundreds of seders in 27 cities across the former Soviet Union. 

The partnership, which includes such year-round programs as medical exchanges, which sends Russian doctors to the United States, involves more than simply giving money. It emphasizes sharing experiences. Federation organizers often find themselves with more worthy applicants than they can handle. 

"Word is out," says Scott Brockman, young leadership division director of the Palm Beach federation. 

After two days of training and preparations, the group performed more than 30 seders in a week, flooding Jewish community organizations, the homes of elderly Jews and satellite communities encircling St. Petersburg. 

The role of the American and Israeli delegation has drastically changed over the years, illuminating the growth of the Jewish community in Russia. The program was launched when foreigners brought seders to a land that was virtually seder-free, but today seders are shared by two groups equally fluent in Passover traditions. 

Russian leaders say two-thirds of their participants are seder veterans. 

In fact, most leaders concur that Russians offer a strong knowledge of Passover basics, while the Americans are expert at running more creative seders, as evidenced by the kitschy pipe-cleaner crafts that enliven the festivities. 

"We aren't exactly scholars, but we bring the example of growing up Jewish," Brockman says. 

Phelps, for example, who is an only child, tells her Russian friends how she and her father hunted for the afikomen together. That's a tradition she plans to maintain in her home. 

Nancy Groysman, a 24-year-old auditor from Cleveland, knows a bit about Passover training. As a first- generation American, she helped her parents, who came to Cleveland from Odessa, Ukraine, 26 years ago learn how to make a seder. 

"It's an incredible opportunity to see the realization of stories and photos that I grew up with," Groysman says. "I'm surprised by the knowledge of the Russians. They've been teaching us the best ways to conduct seder."

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JTA - 04.27.2005

'No longer satisfied with the basics': Seders in Russia reach adolescence

By Adam B. Ellick

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (JTA) When Lynn Schusterman and her family first set foot in the Soviet Union in 1985, it was a heavy step indeed. 

She and her daughter were layered in 12 pairs of control-top panty hose while her son and husband swelled in several pairs of jeans. 

They shed the prized clothing inside the imposing Choral Synagogue, placing them into the arms of refuseniks for whom jeans and panty hose meant cash on the black market. Later in the trip, they handed over bags bloated with prayer books, maps of Israel and medicine concealed under such permissible literature as engineering books. 

Twenty years and some 20 trips to the region later, Schusterman, one of the leading philanthropists involved with Jewish life in the region, has just completed a six-day return to Russia's cultural capital, St. Petersburg, with two granddaughters to witness the evolution of the very underground movements she supported through the 1990s Jewish rebirth to today's maturing Russian Jewish world. 

"It all started here in 1985. To see what's possible 20 years later is a miracle," Schusterman said. "It's about freedom and coming out of slavery. The whole story of Exodus is here. And I wanted my granddaughters to see it, just as their mom was with me in 1985." 

A quintessential example of this remarkable transformation is the Pesach Project, an initiative of Hillel in the former Soviet Union that offers seder tutelage for young Jewish university students. Those students have taken their new knowledge and run communal seders since the program's 1996 inception, as a form of local empowerment. 

FSU Hillel runs on a $1.5 million annual budget, supported in equal thirds by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Hillel International and the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation. The foundation pumps about $1 million into the region each year, supporting non-sectarian "joys of Jewish living, giving and learning." 

The Pesach Project is not the only U.S.-based program that organizes seders in the former Soviet Union. Both the Reform movement, which this year sent 50 students from its Hebrew Union College, and Chabad, which sent 200 rabbinic students, ran seders in the region this year as well. 

This year, St. Petersburg was home to the only international Pesach Project, hosting 24 young adults from its cohesive partnership communities -- the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County and Israelis from the Safed region, who share a Partnership 2000 affiliation with Palm Beach. Those groups have come to Russia annually since 1997, and this year co-produced more than 30 seders in St. Petersburg, known as the Venice of the North for its extensive canals. 

The Pesach Project, mirroring Russian Jewry at large, has seen a gradual professionalism since 1996 when unaffiliated Russian Jewish participants offered sausage sandwiches to a visiting Chabad delegation from England. 

"One Chabad boy cooked an egg over the fire with two spoons," said Misha Levin, director of Hillel in St. Petersburg, explaining that the boy didn't want to use nonkosher cookware. "It was a shock from both ends, but now we know" more about the laws of kashrut. 

Each of the 27 cities in the region that houses a Hillel also has a Pesach Project, but in such cosmopolitan centers such as Moscow and St. Petersburg Jewish knowledge is commonplace. In smaller, more remote places, though, where basic resources are hard to find, the project remains elementary. 

In other words, Jewish knowledge is distributed across Russia in a pattern similar to the way the country's wealth is distributed. There's Moscow and St. Petersburg -- and then there's the rest of this sprawling nation, which spans 10 other time zones. 

"In the start, every little act was a miracle. We went to community seders, showed matzah and people were amazed," said Anna Purinson, 27, the director of Russian Hillel, who first because involved in the project as a student in 1996. "Now, in big cities they're no longer satisfied with basics. They don't want to consume, they want to produce" their own seders. 

When the project started, "everyone thought we didn't have enough skills and knowledge," Levin says. His Hillel chapter, in St. Petersburg, is one of the organization's most vibrant, with 600 active student members. "They weren't only proven wrong, but now Jewish communities can conduct seders without us. 

"We were like angels for these communities and now we' re just counterparts. In some ways, it's now more important for us than for them." 

One of the more warming outcomes of the project for Levin is a seder to which he has never gone. He heard about it from Vera, a Hillel graduate he hadn't seen since 1997. "She's been making seder in her grandmother's home each year since," Levin said. 

That's no faint accomplish in this vast nation, where Judaism still is mainly confined to festive communal settings. Because Russian Jews are still recovering from the fear of Soviet oppression that once haunted them, the seder has not yet been brought into most homes. 

Purinson's not impressed even by the largest gatherings -- several hundred convened for one of Hillel's showcased seders. She says, "These are amazing numbers -- but knowing the number of Jewish students, it's a poor number." 

For Schusterman, who spent her visit discussing texts with students and shuttling around to various Jewish centers as the April snowflakes fell, the visit provides a glance at the results of her philanthropy. 

Take Alyona Arenkova, 26, who had no connection with her Jewish identity until her 2000 birthright israel trip. Birthright is another program partly funded by Schusterman. When she returned to St. Petersburg, Arenkova joined Hillel, founded a klezmer band and played piano tunes at seders for the project. Such dedication earned her a Charlie award -- the honor was named after Schusterman's late husband, Charles -- that recognizes distinguished Birthright Alumni. 

"I look at them as my children," said Schusterman. "I used to dream about these seders. We Americans have a tendency to get blase or take Jewishness for granted. 

"Russians didn't always have this, so they're bringing a joy to celebrating the holidays that we've lost in a way. It's contagious. I love it. It's so rewarding, and very emotional," she said. 

The lesson was hardly lost on Schusterman's 10-year-old granddaughter, Abby Dow of Tulsa, Okla., who perhaps provided the most concise summation of the week. "In 1985 they were here helping Jews and now we're just here celebrating with them," she said.

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